Deathcharger's Reins

I found something exciting in my Satchel, the other day. [Deathcharger's Reins]! To my surprise one of the few times I solo queued for a random heroic on Zenborg as a healer, I hit the jackpot. Borgthor rarely tanks outside of guild activities, but my newly dinged 85 DK tank Borgelmir has been doing a bunch. It has still been worthwhile, since he's had at least 3 free flasks and some gems in addition to the extra coin.

I also just realised that outside of Twitchie's exploits and the odd piece of mount news, I've posted very little else. Guild raiding is covered on our forum and blog, so feel free to head on over and check it out. At 12/12 and 3 hard modes, we're traveling very well as we hurtle towards patch 4.2 and firelands.

Glory of the Icecrown Raider

 

Last week (after a week twiddling our thumbs thanks to a heroic lockout bug (this itself may warrant another post)) we finished off Heroic Sindragosa for the Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

 

It was a great effort by all the gang, and when she finally went down our trusty engineers whipped out the mailbox for our drakes.

 

Oddox and I were decked out in full frost resist gear, which was made a lot more attractive with the removal of defense rating. With epic stamina gems, they offered almost the same amount of health, a ton of frost resist at the cost of reduced armor and avoidance. Reforging into mastery as a warrior tank worked well in this set up as the improved physical damage mitigation though the reworked blocking mechanic helped smooth out the incoming damage.

RNG still plays a large role in this fight, since often two of your healers can be out of action with unchained magic or ice blocked. However after successfully completing the achievement for Sindragosa, the tank taunt rotation and speed of breaking the ice blocks was very good leaving us to concentrate on the additional mechanics and more brutal damage output.

So for our first Heroic Sindragosa kill last Friday, we ended up with 4 drakes, and followed up on the Sunday with another pummeling of Heroic Putricide for another two. This week we are back in there again, and have blasted through 7 hard modes, and toppled the PP achievement for toons that were unable to attend in previous weeks. While some members of the team are a least another week away, we should complete some more drakes tonight, including one for a new friend from Greenstone who has been a regular part of the team of late.

Big thanks for everyone who has been a part of our 10 man progression team, and The Ancients for all your support.

Kingslayers

 

Yes, plural. While I’ve been jabbering on about a few other things a couple more of my toons have taken down the Lich King.

Firstly, Zenborg grabbed a Lich King kill in the week following our guild’s first kill. 13th June 2010. For the first night, we were short a healer and we wanted to give one of our regular tanks that missed the first kill at shot at LK so Zenborg plucked up the courage to try some hard modes on for size. The following night, Kalus was able to come, so I breathed a sigh of relief and was able to pew pew.

DPSing the Lich King fight is a lot of fun. I gave myself the task of mowing down the orbs that drift towards the group during phase transitions. Given that devouring plague can one shot an orb, and mind flay ticks so quickly, it was great fun handling the orbs while pumping as much DPS into the raging spirits as possible. Having AoE that works for the vial spirits is awesome fun, and dispersion really comes into its own as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get soul harvested, and still haven’t been on any of my toons to this day.

Next up, Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock). 28th August 2010. For a while there, we were really struggling to put together a 10 man group capable of making progress in ICC hard modes. We had our usual core toons, but some of our favourite people were unavailable both nights, or away on holiday. In particular we had a massive void in the healing department, with Jondayla our only regular healer. So we put together some alts groups and tore normal mode ICC apart, usually leaving Jondayla to keep healing. Eventually, helping numerous people get their Kingslayer titles [and then watching them sail off into the night] I managed to sneak Twitchie in for a kill. Using a lock portal to render the Val’kry impotent was quite satisfying.

Finally (so far), Borgelmir. 3rd October 2010. Despite making his main spec Unholy DPS, and trying to stick to my guns... he has ended up tanking quite a bit. The week Borgelmir got his Kingslayer title, the 10 man progression team extended a lock out to work on the Sindragosa and LK achievements for the Glory of the Icecrown raider. When we managed to finish of both achievements in one night, we had a spare raid night left over. Finally we managed to get Jondy’s warlock Jossamine her Kingslayer title, and Borgelmir was tanking away when it happened. Getting Lich King twice in a week was very satisfying.

So that just leaves Wrathborg, who unless he can sneak in this afternoon, is going to be doing it post Patch 4.0.1. I’ve got about 800 1002 glyphs ready to go, Jondy has scarlet rubies and fire in the mail... and I’m rearing to go.

(Re)Introducing Wrathborg

Wrathborg is my rogue and first alt (second toon) in WoW. He started out life as a tailor, because I wanted to make my own bags. In fact so much so that his leveling in the early days (before Borg was 70) was centered around breaking that next crafting skill cap. I soon got tired of a weird looking Elven tailor, and as Zenborg took over tailoring he was benched.

Despite Jondy’s many pleas to bring back the rogue (and severe objections to the notion that I might delete him)... he stayed benched while Zenborg, Borgelmir and Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock) all leveled through to 80 in Wrath.

Finally, I decided to ditch Tailoring for skinning, and keep engineering despite Borgelmir also having that profession. I also looked into the specs and decided that an Assasination (mutilate) rogue was right for him. While mutilate rogues get some teasing for being on the faceroll side of the equation, even while leveling I found dual wielding daggers, spending a lot of time in stealth and wreaking havoc with poisons just felt like what I wanted my rogue to be.

Wrathborg hit 80 late August, and in his second ICC 10 man cruised through 11/12 with his favourite companion Jorgie [leveling partner, and Jondy’s enhancement shaman]. Wrath has been extremely lucky with loot, picking up [Rib Spreader] and [Flesh-Carving Scalpel] in his first 25 and 10 man run respectively. I was very surprised to pick up the heroic [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] in ICC 25 shortly after purchasing the regular version.

My DPS highlight thus far has to be in that second ICC10 run, when on Rotface, the combination of heroism, great buffs, great RNG (no infection) and a group that could kill him in 2m27s made for a delightful 11.2k DPS.

Bonus highlight (since I started writing this post): [Deathbringer’s Will] !!!!!!!!!! I was lucky enough to pick up DBW (although I was hoping for [Heartpierce] (for PvP as much as anything)) in a PuG this week. I then put it to great use and hit my stride for 13.8k DPS on Festergut. While there was some room for improvement (like better Hunger for Blood uptime and yelling a fellow rogues for tricks) it was nice to trash Borgthor’s effort the previous week with his newly acquired DBW.

I went out to farm leather while waiting for a PuG to form one day, and despite being not too poorly geared, the memory of how Twitchie would tear mammoths and rhinos apart was just too much to handle... so with the help of Jondy’s secret stash of low level herbs, I power leveled Alchemy in a quick session after breakfast one day (just wait until you see what she got in return). I went Elixir Master partly so I could produce the guild’s flasks myself, but mostly as a potential income stream come cataclysm. I gotta say, the 2 hour flasks and extra AP are pretty nice. An extra regular transmute per day is icing on the cake.

So after a very shaky start, Wrathborg has proved to be a joy to play.

Heroic Professor Putricide 10 man

 
Last week we had a lot of fun finishing off the Sindragosa and Lich King achievements so that we could finish off ICC in a single raid lock out. Sindragosa required some precision in order to avoid stacking Mystic Buffet over 5, and once we got the tank rotation together, things started to proceed like clockwork. We would flip the boss from side to side, so that the tanks only had to run straight out to find the next ice block and by the end, the taunting was tight enough that I had to avoid running straight into incoming toons who were Frost Beancon’d. I had to grab a couple of extra toons for the night, and to my surprise advertising for the specific achievements resulted in some pleasant and competent toons; to date my best pugging effort.

The LK achievement took a couple of attempts to get the disease stacking correctly, but once we got it going it was a matter of a clean kill after that to bring the achievement home. We had a couple of hiccups with tank deaths due to a couple of enraged Shamblers, and once we had the plague skip from 29 to 31. It was also a joy to have the regular mechanics of the fight reasonably well known, and it was satisfying to see how fast some of the Val’kyr went down.

This last week our big challenge was the remaining two hard modes before LK, heroic Putricide and heroic Sindragosa. Heroic Putricide takes a bit of getting used to, since the unbound plague mechanic takes a reasonable amount of raid awareness and communication to coordinate. We found (like many groups do) that there is limited value in assigning an infection order, or a location from which to share the plague. Instead, everyone needs to fully understand the mechanic, and focus dealing with it in the most productive way given several variables.

First up, the unbound plague lasts for 60 seconds. After being infected for 10 - 12 seconds you become extremely difficult to heal (the damage increases with every tick) so you need to pass the plague (with the remaining duration) to another toon. The flip side is the the plague is that each time the plague moves, it leaves a stacking debuff (plague sickness) on the original target that increases the damage done by unbound plague by 250% per stack. In the normal course of dealing with the plague you can expect about 5 - 6 people to be infected if all goes well, however the more the plague bounces around, the quicker toons need to pass it off due to increasing stacks of sickness.

So the goals with the sickness are to:

• Keep the sickness as long as possible while remaining easy to heal (10 - 12 seconds)
• Pass the sickness to someone with as few stacks of sickness as possible (zero is best)
• Pass the sickness to someone who can easily identify the next person to pass it to
• Deal with strategy that require people to stack or move quickly, which can make it a lot harder to sensibly share the plague
• Deal with the regular mechanics at the same time while putting out significantly more healing / DPS / tanking than in normal mode

All that takes a little practise, and it really helps if people are able to communicate over vent to coordinate.

The next major change is for transitions, instead of getting stunned in place, you get to deal with a Green Slime and and an Orange Gas Cloud at the same time. The strategy we landed on was to zerg the green slime (all stacking near the spawn point) and kite the orange gas cloud until we got around to finishing it off. So if the Abom has more than 90 energy, it can slow both and if not, the orange gas cloud is the priority. At best, the tank in the Abom suit can spit on both slimes and everything goes nicely... at worst you can be dealing with a plague, people getting separated when the green slime explodes, and several toons dead in the process of a transition. It is also important to time the transition properly, since if you already have a slime/cloud up, you will end up with 3 which will most likely lead to a wipe. If you are running just a touch late on the transition, don’t worry if you force a transition just as he is starting to cast you can only end up with two. When I say a touch late, I’m not kidding, we forced a transition just as the ooze started to form, and we got three - so don’t try and take advantage of this as part of your strategy, just be glad if you you’re running late and only get two.

We ended up running with four druids, and while learning the fight the extra battle resurrections were valuable, but in our kill we needed none. If you have good enough execution for the last transition, you can have PP under 30% by the time he’s finished drinking his concoction which helps a lot with the soft enrage for the last phase (which aside from everything hurting more, requiring higher DPS and potentially having to deal with unbound plague is essentially the same). Since you aren't frozen, once you've killed both oozes feel free to give PP a whack while he's still drinking his concoction.

Big thanks to Therepoman, who ended up tanking on his druid, Healforreal. I’m still not sure it’s sunk in (for me), but he ended up with a well deserved (heroic) [Unidentifiable Organ]. Many of us would be a little reluctant to switch to an alt being so close the our ICC Drakes, and others oblivious to the opportunity they are getting to say... kill Lich King for the first time AND get Been Waiting for this for a Long Time. However, Repo logged without hesitation and did a great job in the meat suit.

So, speculation is that the patch is looming this week, leaving us just 2 more heroic modes in ICC.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention Moordenar picked up the heroic [Flesh-carving Scapel] just in time to see assassination make a comeback post patch.

Tamed at last!

After days of camping (lucky he's a Blood Elf), and with the help of a speedy alliance gnome (complete with 310% mount) Jondy finally tamed the Spirit Kitty on her horde hunter!

10/12 ICC 25 - PP Down

An important milestone this week. After having some trouble repeating our efforts on the Blood Queen, one $#%^-ton of flares later, we one shot Blood Queen, and got to have a couple of cracks at Putricide.

Putricide went down on our first night of attempts, with the phase transitions being just perfect on our last two attempts. While I may have been over enthusiastic in convincing our guild that I know what I'm talking about, we managed a seamless kill and got our first half dozen tier tokens in a raid lockout.

Most importantly we managed to get 10/12 ICC 25 inside the 20% ICC buff, which... by tomorrow... will be a distant memory as we stomp through the place with an extra quarter of KABLAM.

10/12 25, 5/12 H 10 is a nice place to nestle before the (20%) buff marches steadily on.

Get to the Choppa!

With the Kingslayer title, comes a sweet new ride. Kalus joined me for a well deserved ride around Dalaran.

Getting to the weekly in style...

... is freakin' awesome!

Moordenar took Zenborg to Naxxramas this week for the weekly, on this newly 310% turbo boosted recruit-a-friend mount!

Awesome.

Just awesome.

P.S. Thanks Moordenar for churning out those 100,000 arrows for me too ;)

Rise of the long lost alt

My original engineer, Wrathborg finally got some play time recently and put together his very own helicopter. I didn't make one on Borgelmir, because a Death Knight in a helicopter didn't seem quite right to me after splurging on a mount that flew with just bones for wings.

I have really enjoyed my leveling mutilate spec, and after dual speccing into combat I'm not to sure what all the fuss is about. Yes, there's some fantasmal cooldowns and some AoE in combat, but how much quicker can things actually die when you're decked out in heirlooms and specs. Mutilate just feels more like I think a rogue should: shadowy, discrete and a powerful arsenal of poisons. What dual spec does however, is add some extra variety in the leveling experience and getting a chance to get a feel for both specs before 80 is a lot of fun.


Lock picking has proved both fun and frustrating. Today I spent some time in Zangarmarsh hunting for the elusive wicker chest to pick. So a couple of tips for rogues out there... Not everything is a footlocker...


... and some people don't just leave their locked goodies strewn around their camp. From 300 - 325 lock picking there's no better place than Feralfen village.

A Poke in the Eye

So after another dismal attempt to convince people to come along to 10 man Yogg+1, we settled on the weekly raid, Eye of Eternity.

Since I hadn't got the 8 man achievement, I thought it might be nice to grab that while we were at it. (Spoiler Alert: my secret gnome warlock got this same achievement the day he hit 80 as part of Champ in a Day(tm)).

Pugging was absolutely excruciating. The number of inexperienced toons, the lack of any useful information provided voluntarily to help find a match (my eyes were almost bleeding after looking at so many missing gems and enchants in the armory). In the end I mistook arrogance for competence and took a Ret Pally / Hunter pair that could have been easily replaced by one decent player for a 7 man attempt.

In any case, we managed to have a pick of 3 main spec tanks for our 1 tank spot, so I got to DPS. I bet you can guess what achievement came next!

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 1 - Northrend Dungeon Hero

Introducing Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock), my not so secret Warlock, and my latest level 80 toon.

For level 80, I wanted to do something special and tear through content that blizzard had decided to make obsolete. So the idea was hatched for Champ In a Day(tm).

Champ in a Day is all about getting the Champion of the Frozen Wastes achievement and title in the first 24 hours of dinging 80. It consists of all the regular heroic dungeons, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity. While you only need to defeat the last boss of each instance for the achievement, I was going to do this properly, and clear ALL bosses in any of the content I attempted.

To document this on the fly, I signed up for twitter on Twitchie. You can follow his adventures through teeny 140 character snippets at http://twitter.com/twitchietgw .

Twitchie logged off before maintenance at level 79, with 1797 spell power, 109 Hit, 8.58% Crit and 12.11% haste. Quite reasonable stats, including heirloom items which made flying through normal instances a lot of fun.


When I woke up just before 4am and logged on, I was delighted to find Oddox and Therepoman already online and rearing to go. By 0409 I had dinged, and 0414 had trained up, added talent points, an extra glyph and got the superior achievement. My bank was a marvel of craftables, spare gems and enchant scrolls. Twitchie's fresh 80 wowhead profile gives you an idea of the step up in stats, including the superior achievement.

The oven was on, preheating for Croissants for breakfast... The kettle was boiled for coffee... There was a 24 pack of pepsi max cans in the fridge. Twitchie Day(tm) is declared OPEN!

Phase One - Northrend Dungeon Hero

• 0416 - Violet Hold - seed of corruption mayhem, but no drain soul ticks since bosses are just getting NUKED.
• 0430 - The Culling of Stratholme - 13k drain soul tick on Salramm, and from memory I think I picked up the drake for good measure.
• 0452 - Gundrak - achievements aplenty
• 0510 - Utgarde Pinnacle
  
• 0525 - Halls of Lightning -
  
• 0540 - The Nexus - Hellyonz (Moordenar) is up early, on his priest Ademar and joins in the fun. We even did a post nerf Chaos Theory, which was a whole new kind of easy.
  
• 0600 - Violet Hold - (again) but I'm joined by my wife Jondy on her baby kitty, so we have a full guild group! Hellyonz is toon switching like mad, soaking up those delicious frosties.
  
• 0615 - Gun'drak - (again) but Helly is on Xarik, so more frosties flow. Share the Love took a full five minutes, and Oddox grabbed his last achievement for Glory of the Hero!
• 0630 - Drak'tharon Keep - between eating croissants (thanks honey!), skinning and tweeting, this instance is a breeze ;)
• 0652 - after amassing 92 EoTs (some from regular dailies post 70) I upgrade to [Helm of Fiery Aftermath]!
• 0700 - Azjol-Nerub - I snaffle [Rod of the Fallen Monarch]
• 0715 - Utgarde Keep - queued for this specifically, since there aren't many left to go
• 0730 - Halls of Stone - Jondy has started on work while I grab another quick run.
• Work time
• 0938 - Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom - Twitchie turns a little red when his melee swing is dodged by a healthy mushroom.
• 1000 - The Oculus - lucky last for Northrend Dungeon Hero, and a well earned upgrade: [Pauldrons of Revered Mortality].
• 1020 - The Forge of Souls - into bonus material already, and starting on dungeons an affliction lock can really sink their teeth into.
• 1040 - After chaining dungeons all morning, Oddox and Repo head off for a well earned break.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Twitchie Day(tm) where Twitchie will start moving and shaking in his very first raid!

Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets

Last night in ICC10, things started out great! We one shot the first four bosses, and made our way towards Stinky and Precious.

Then [Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets] dropped from trash! I was very excited. The first thing I thought was, "what an awesome loot policy it is to allow BoEs be given to participating main spec toons". My second (although hard to say, since they came thick and fast at this point) was something about how wonderful it is to tank along side a Paladin. I was also relieved that Parl's warrior Oddox had the thing already when he rolled for it... and that certain rogues just like to make trouble. You'd think after being made to wait (not be me (or on purpose)) to roll on [Death's Verdict] he'd know better.

The main reson for my excitement was really about the gun's looks. It is a relatively small upgrade, since ranged weapons are teeny stat sticks for warriors... but just take a second look at that thing! It effortlessly combines a bayonet, with a mini-gun-esque front barrel, with pointy!

Things got better from there, and after one shotting Festergut, we faced off against Rotface. We two healed the encounter, and things were looking very promising right from word kgo. By the time the first Ooze combined and exploded Rotface was at about 45% health, and we had pretty good slime merges right through the fight, leading to a kill.

I also really enjoyed kiting the slimes as a Warrior tank. Vigilance is a great tool to keep the healer aggro on an even keel, and if you time it just right... Heroic Throw, Shockwave, Thunder Clap and shouts are enough to keep the big slimes rolling your way.

To top things off I hit exalted with Ashen Verdict and picked up [Ashen Band of Endless Courage].

Happy New Year

So, it's been a while since I posted....having been completely distracted with 3.3 and RL work ramping up... so here it goes with another proverbial catch up post.

Before patch 3.3, we managed to complete all but one of my goals for the guild's progression.

• 19/11/2009 - 5/5 TotC 25 man
  
• 22/11/2009 - 4/5 TotGC 10 man
  
• 30/11/2009 - Ulduar 10 hard modes / drake achievements up to and including Hodir
  
• 07/12/2009 - Ulduar 10 Thorim hard mode

The only thing missing from that list was Yogg-Saron in 25 man Ulduar. Hopefully we'll be having another crack at him on Saturday night. We did have a great time with Vezax 25, and the interrupts were so good it almost felt like a holiday for me on our successful attempt.

Zenborg kept his streak alive and managed to clear TotC25 before Borgthor, and was suitably rewarded by getting Moonspirit to craft [Merlin's Robes] for him.

Borgthor managed to sneak into a Sarth+3D 25 man zerg, and walk away with the drake!

Borgelmir came out of retirement, and started pwning some content as unholy. The changes in 3.3 have made it the 'in' spec, but I really enjoyed 3.2 unholy and had a lot of fun spreading my diseases. It was also fantastic to win [Justice Bringer] and then turn down offers of unspeakable mountains of coin to trade it.

Zenborg got into GDKP and had a very nice run through 25 man TotC and came out with an extra 3600g, but that experience deserves it's own post, so keep a look out for that.

Onyxia's Lair came along, which wasn't too exciting but both Zen and Borg enjoy their 25 man helms. The warrior DPS helm is very nicely itemised, and was a great pickup while tanking.

I refined my guild bank purchasing system, devoting my level 20-odd mage to herb and flask storage. We ended the year with a stock of almost 1000 flasks which we sell to guildies at about 60% of market value.

The guild had a couple of weeks off progression raiding over Christmas, and now back in the new year, we're 5/12 in ICC 10 and 3/12 in ICC 25.

What a long, strange trip...

It all ended with my favourite festival in WoW, Brewfest. I had completed every possible achievement available the year before and logged in early on the first day of Brewfest only to find that Coren Direbrew wasn't due out until the 'start' of the event in 'US time'. I had even disturbed the peace as soon as I could get to Dalaran sans mage port when the expansion came out.

It was well worth the wait, as Brewmaster is the most cherished of all my titles associated with festival events in WoW... which I temporarily forgot about... because I had mail!

I didn't expect the mount to feel a whole lot faster, and it didn't at first. The fact that it's so BIG had me thinking, is this really 310% speed? Then I looked at where I was on the map after my test flight and decided - YES! this is freakin' 310% speed!

The violet protodrake (violet, not pink, Obe) is a great looking beast for starters. Then the speed... oh the speed. I can't describe how good it... oh wait, yes I can. The speed feels awesome. So awesome in fact, that it has made mining FUN again. I even decided to take a lap through Sholozar Basin while putting a guild progression raid together, and by the time everyone had decided to log on... I had 80+ saronite ore, and all the eternals and gems to go with it.

The most exciting part of Brewfest this year, was obtaining my long sought after ram mount! I got the kodo last gear, which I admit after 12 months of use, does suit a tank rather well... but I was still hanging out for the ram. He doesn't disappoint, and is the only land mount I'm using at the moment.

It is such a relief to have the Violet Protodrake, and to look forward to a year, almost festival free. While I thoroughly enjoyed brewfest, I can't say the same for most of the other festivals. In fact the person most happy to see me find a 310% speed mount in my mail was my wife, Jondy... who is hoping that the coming festival season will see WoW related swearing drop by about 50%.

Trial of the Crusader (10) Cleared!

We cleared Trial of the Crusader on 10 man on the weekend, in the first week that Anub'Arak was available, and best of all we one shot him. Anub'Arak's downfall inspired this new spirit of posting as events unfold rather than as a one liner in a "lets get caught up" post.


We were so excited at the one shot, that even getting severely pwned by the heroic mode couldn't dampen our spirits. It did however, send me the the combat log to come up with the following analysis of the impale mechanic:

• can't be avoided or blocked
• on impale you get hit hard (17k (also scaling with number of snobolds out))
• it ticks every 2 seconds, scaling with the number of stacks (probably also scaling with snobolds), rough numbers below
  

• 1 stack - 2k
• 2 stacks - 5k
• 3 stacks - 9k

• Damage scaling as expected on both tanks (no unusual difference between pally and warrior tanks)
• Gormok is immune to Disarm on heroic mode (you're always going to get impaled)

So with our great healers, and a disarm to reduce impale stacks... we could afford to be quite sloppy on how we dealt with it on normal mode... not so on heroic.


This week we also got Auriaya in Ulduar 25, making 3 new bosses over our first two weeks of getting a Ulduar 25 raid up and running for two nights. As usual, I'm caught between making further progress into the keepers, or trying out TotC25 and getting some trophies into the guild.

We also got a new VoA boss, Koralon the Flame Watcher. I really should have made a prediction on which element was next, but I missed the chance. I'm assuming water is next, and predicting that we port down through the crossroads between all three for that one.

I managed to get the boss down in 10 and 25 man on both Borg and Zen, with a pleasing one shot 25 man for Zenborg. It was fantastic to get a guild group for the 10 man, which ensures any useful loot that drops stays in the guild. I missed out on lewt altogether, but Jondy was very excited with [Malfurion's Leggings of Triumph]. Zen's 25 man dropped a total of 0 (yes, zero) PvE pieces, which was met by delightful screams about injustice. Remember people, that luck is just probability taken personally.

There's lots more to talk about and share, but since the frequency of posts seems to be inversely proportional to the effort expended on each post... I'd better stop there. I've convinced myself that I'll do some special "scrapbook from the past" posts to cover those special things I've missed... I guess time will tell.

I have the coolest friends...

No updates for a while, means another super sonic catch up post... going backwards this time.

The I Have the Coolest Friends achievement from keeping all the NPCs up on Hodir 10 man was a nice surprise at the end of our first successful attempt, and really capped off a great night of raiding. We condensed our recent two night forays into Ulduar into a single night, and got a new boss, and saw our first (Hunter) tier token. Add in the achievements for A Quick Shave and Nerf Gravity Bombs, it made for a great night.

Ulduar 10: 8/14

I have the coolest friends also sums up how I'm feeling about my guild of late. We're a social guild, so we're not blazing trails through new content, and there's always more to do than we can fit in the schedule... but I've really enjoyed raid leading recently with some polished performances, and having master looting (and DKP allocation) being taken off my hands. We've settled into the DKP loot system, we've added decay, and toons have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of loot that ends up in the hands of first time raiders and new alts (as was I when only one toon rolled on
Surplus Limb).

Next up, we got Malygos down in 25 man mode on 23rd May on our first night working on the boss. I'm not sure if people actually expected us too, since we had more toons sign up for one Ulduar 10 man group, than our Malygos attempt. The less than stellar attendance was a blessing in disguise however, with some diligant pugging, we picked up some of our top DPS for the evening, including some stellar performers on the drakes. As a nice reward, the massive DKP Helly and I sunk into the Key turned into a fantastic neck piece at the end of the night.

Malygos 25: 1/1

The Ancients defeated Heroic Naxxramas on 25th April, shortly after patch 3.1 was released. Since then we have cleared another couple of times (on a fortnightly schedule) and dished out a lot of nice loot. I have been lucky enough to get [Wall of Terror] and [Last Laugh] already, which with a couple of drops from Ulduar 10 man, has me geared out for tier 7, and I finally got the Epic achievement (I believe I owe a certain fellow tank a new gun). I had great fun with our most recent clear, which saw 11 bosses drop in 3 hours flat on our first night, which left us plenty of time to get into Ulduar 25 on the second night of raiding to beat down Flame Leviathan and have a quick look at Razorscale.

Naxxramas 25: 15/15
Ulduar 25: 1/14

So that catches me up on the raiding of late. Since patch 3.1 I've been regularly pugging Emalon, and even helping to gain control over Wintergrasp, although I'm not sold on this whole PvP thing... I'm told I have enough honor to get 'something good' but it just seems like too much work to make space in my bank to store yet another set of gear. Having said that, it could do with a good clean out! Borgthor is my main, so only he has this problem of keeping sentimental gear, holiday bits and pieces and a massive shield collection. Does anyone else have this problem? To give you an idea how bad it is, I still have the full imperial plate set sitting in there.

Borg's DPS gear is coming along, and to my total surprise picked up two (yes TWO) plate DPS pieces in Naxx25 on the offset roll. I have traded in the [Collosal Skull-Clad Cleaver] for [Relentless Edge] which adds an element of awesome to the set, and while the 3.2 speed isn't optimal for ARMS, it was another welcome upgrade! Today's 4% haste buff to ARMS will be interesting to test out... maybe on something more exciting than a test dummy. /hint hint

While I remember... I have to get this down in writing so someone can hold me to it. Getting [Last Laugh] from KT25 gives me the perfect excuse to try out a UA spec on a a few bosses next time we go into Naxxramas!

My DK, Borgelmir (who I haven't formally introduced) is sitting at 71 just doing JC dailies... but might have some motivation to level with alts of friends, my wife, and with Obe returning for at least a little while all having toons within cooeee of his level. I have maxed out JC, but still need some help deciding on a second profession. I'm leaning towards Engineering (BS would be good too but it's out) and Alchemy looked attractive for a while (see next paragraph for why it's not)... What profession do you think my DK should level next?

I've been going crazy on the AH again (with a secret inscribing toon) which had me in the habit of a project I'd wanted to get underway for a long time. Flasks for All! With the subsidised Abyss Crystal trade from raiding, and some sizable "I'm leaving WoW" donations from guildies, The Ancients guild bank had a healthy bank balance to start the project. So as Jondy puts it, I ... "just went nuts". I've turned over about 10k gold in getting the guild bank stocked with flasks, including herbs, vials and even flasks themselves when they are cheap enough. To start with, I would have sessions with Jondayla at the guild bank to churn out flasks, but had totally overlooked our resident elixir masters in the guild! Now with Helly churning out flasks with an impressive proc rate, we can off flasks to our gulidies at between 10 - 30% less than market price as a sustainable process. I've been excited to see how quickly they disappear, and even more excited by the strike rate of guild bank deposits to match.

Well, I think that's me all caught up, happy now Obe? Yes, Obe's return to WoW was the precursor to this post... but to look at the comments section, you'd think the readership for this blog was just me (and my wife (please direct all editing comments to Jondayla)). So... you want updates? Say so via your comments here! ... and help me decide on a second profession for my DK while you're at it!

Flying like an Eagle ...

... and you thought there were no achievements for raid leading?

Champion of the Frozen Wastes

The Ancients Defeated Malygos in the Eye of Eternity (10 man) on 15th March 2008.

The kill exemplified what I think progression raiding should be all about. In each effort over 13 attempts we clawed a little closer to the spell caster's demise.

When Malygos fell, my and Jondayla's confidence shone through, our twin 'Champion of the Frozen Wastes' achievements lighting up the screen. Over the next few days (and weeks) we were able to tank and heal some of our fellow guildies through Heroic Occulus and Heroic Old Kingdom to get their titles.


To top it all off, as if Malygos himself knew that something really special was required to deserve Champagne, the shield dropped. [Barricade of Eternity].

Zen Can Fly!

... again ... but new and improved.

Almost a month since my last post... We've got Naxx10 on farm, but just shy of clearing in a single night. We've got Naxx25 man up and running - 6/15 - but are really struggling for numbers each week, and there doesn't seem to be enough time in the schedule for Malygos, although we've had our first peek and got through to phase 3.

I temporarily lost interest in Zenborg after a slight miscalculation about both which level I was, and which level I would get Mind Sear. Shifting the distance to the event from 20% of a level to more than two whole levels almost shattered my mind, and I went back shield slamming until I felt a bit better. After recovering, I finally gave in to the need to quests after leveling to 73 without seeing a ? during WotlK.

After a quick steak farming trip around the Fjord testing the limitations of mind sear, I quickly set it to work in some instances. Unfortately there was virtually no difference in my experience in VH with mind sear and without, since my first instance after hitting 75 saw me partied with possibly the worst tank I've played with in WoW (certainly in the top 5). Then it was on... even through Halls of Lightning at level 76, where I was owning on the trash, but even with a whack of hit, missing and getting severely (partially) resisted on the bosses.

Finally after hitting level 78, and realising I could get started on Sons of Hodir rep, something snapped. The flight from Dun Niffelum to Thorim, even on my brand new flying carpet seemed to take FOREVER. I knew I would need to make this trip several more times. I think deep down, I started to weep. I quickly checked my balance... only 3700g on the server! However, while leveling tailoring I had already made a [Magnificent Flying Carpet], and I knew it was only a matter of time before Zen was due to fly fast. Almost telepathically (or maybe she actually heard the gears grinding in my skull) Jondy could sense my anguish, and with very little begging forked over 1400g to see me through. Then it was done...

Then as quick as a flash, I could resume the Sons of Hodir questline at super speed.